Advances in digital photography technology and decreasing costs for quality equipment have resulted in an increasingly popular interest in digital imaging editing systems. With today's technology, even amateurs in digital imaging are familiar with digital imaging applications that allow users to enhance digital image color, focus, contrast, etc. Such applications also provide tools with which users can cut, paste and format particular selections within an image.
Manipulating a digital image typically requires some way to select one or more portions of an image for enhancement, moving, copying, formatting, etc. Coincident with this is a need to display selections to a user so that the user can know what portions of an image have been selected. One way in which this is done is to provide an outline, or border, around an object or area that has been selected by a user. Many times, a selection outline is provided in the form of “marching ants”—an animated dotted line that is drawn around the selection.
In a typical case, a best-fit method is used to determine a best fit line through and/or around selected pixels. With a best-fit method, some selected pixels are only partially encompassed by the best-fit line used to outline the selection. As a result, a user typically gets an inaccurate representation of the selected pixels.